Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Atheism 213
us who are aware of the slipperiness of philosophical argument and of how
dependent it is on various background assumptions might put Prob(h) as
perhaps low but not zero or infinitesimal. Moreover the argument from evil
would not worry a theist who thought that God was not good or was perhaps
even malicious. She might worship God because of the power she attributes
to God, not because of attributing goodness to God. Prima facie at least a
Calvinist ought to be such a theologian. To divide the population into sheep
and goats and to send the goats to hell is surely to be malicious. The notion
that salvation is by grace, not by works, connects with this apparently arbitrary
division into sheep and goats. In passing, even if a libertarian theory of
free will were viable (which I myself would deny), this would not justify the
division into sheep and goats.
There is a further consideration which might lead us to put Prob(e/h) as
itself low. Why should we suppose that God should be specially interested in
life or even consciousness? This seems to be an anthropic or at least biocentric
attitude. It may be that with the development of neuroscience, consciousness
will lose its aura of mystery. In any case a God as envisaged by John Leslie as
an ethical principle could hardly be conscious. (It is true that in his latest
book, Infinite Minds, Leslie argues for a pantheism which is something of
a hybrid between Berkeley and Spinoza. 23 )
It should be noted that usually, and certainly here, Bayes’ theorem should
be construed as concerned with subjective probabilities. An advantage of
repeated use (i.e. with different evidence) of the theorem is that it will lead
to two or more people to converge on something like an objective probability
(or at least consensus) even though they start from different subjective probabilities.
However, repeated use of the theorem does not seem to be possible
when we are dealing with a question about God and the universe.
8 Biological Considerations
Physicists are on the whole more likely to be drawn to theism than biologists,
especially those who have a biochemical bent and are hard-boiled materialists
with a mechanistic view of life and mind. An exception, who has drawn some
attention though without making much impression on orthodox evolutionists,
is M.J. Behe who actually argues from biological considerations to the
necessity for belief in divine intervention in the evolutionary process, and so
would support John Haldane’s use of biological considerations in the present
volume. 24
According to Behe, there has been too easy an acceptance of neo-
Darwinism. In a sense he has revived an argument of Paley’s type such as
that of the watch. If one was walking over a moor and found a watch, one